One of the first Italian restaurants I visited was in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. I was with my uncle’s wife, Clare, whose stylish sister Alison was going out with Vito, whose family owned the restaurant. The tables had red and white checkered tablecloths, and on each was a tall glass filled with even taller packets of breadsticks, several of which I took and crushed on the way home – the clearest memory of an evening almost four decades ago! A vague memory is of eating breadcrumbed chicken and tomato sauce, then neat balls of gelato.
Years later, the Italian American boyfriend of a girl I waitressed with explained that for it to be parm, the chicken must be on the sauce and topped with slices of mozzarella or, better still, provolone, which I had never heard of. That made him laugh, but not in a nice way. He cooked us chicken parm in their kitchen in Homerton, east London, and set off the fire alarm in the process. It was many years before I finally understood that parm was short for parmigiana; probably the invention of Italian immigrants in the US and elsewhere, too (the Argentinian milanesa a la napolitana could well have come first), possibly the fortuitous meeting of a breadcrumbed cutlet with a layered aubergine parmigiana.
